# 30. General Discouragement in the Field of Philosophy

General discouragement in the field of philosophy – cowardice of thought – Volkelt as an example -—. It was he who, in the introduction to his “Traumphantasie” (1875), sharply criticized the only apparent resignation, but in truth half-heartedness and discouragement of thought, which no longer wants to boldly tackle the central problems of existence. (1884), Basel inaugural address: On the Possibility of Metaphysics. The expression of this despondency is the emergence of the many epistemologies - Lotze's saying about sharpening knives - but the knives have remained blunt - epistemology has not grasped the actual fundamental philosophical task - Lasalle's saying: “Philosophy can be nothing but the consciousness that the empirical sciences attain of themselves.”

All our philosophical science is under the spell of Kantianism. Since Otto Liebmann (1865) proclaimed the motto “back to Kant”, it has not been abandoned by research. Our most important natural scientists are subject to it.

All higher thinking of our nation is based on the fundamental tone of Kant's world view. We believe that with Kantianism we have now overcome dogmatism; in truth, we have exchanged nothing but a bad dogma, an article of faith: the belief in Kant's infallibility. Before Kant, there were dualists, monists, and pluralists. There was a limit to science, but not a limit to knowledge. It was Kant who first drew limits to our knowledge. Kant established a dualism, a two-worlds theory, which has forever blocked our access to the foundations of existence. Kant exchanged the certainty and security of our knowledge for its absoluteness.

He examines our cognitive faculty in order to gain an understanding of its capabilities. He finds two roots: sensuality and reason. Our mental organization creates our experience with the material of sensations. Therefore, cognition is limited to the latter. Skimming over experience is impossible because of the nature of the cognitive faculty. The In-Itself is forever unknowable. Theoretical reason only as a regulative. Surrogate practical reason. Ethics of the categorical imperative. Should. Kantianism perfect dualism. Two worlds: the world of the self and the world of experience. Two principles of knowledge: knowledge and belief. The subjectivism that this entails has not been abandoned.

> As long as the trick of looking around the corner, i.e. 'without imagining, is not invented, Kant's proud self-modesty will have it that of the being, its that can be recognized, but never its what.

This dogma is the rock on which every opposing opinion is dashed. Otto Liebmann calls the sentence a sacrosanct principle. Hartmann's transcendental realism is based on it. Necessary consequences, e.g. spiritism. Du Bois-Reymond's view. Ignorabism. Subjectivism in modern science a consequence of Kantianism.

But how did the world of ideas come to be indicated? The split into subject and object is a product of our organization. Not a manifold is given to us, but we split the one into a manifold. Not unity is an illusion, but multiplicity. The task of science must therefore be: to overcome the multiplicity in the mind that is caused by our organization and to reshape it into unity. An element of science is only justified if it is split off from the whole of reality somewhere. Science is therefore only ever an association of the elements of reality that have been split up by our organization. The nature of the association must arise from the nature of the elements themselves. Immanent theories. They are contrasted with the transcendent theories. Atomism and metaphysical theories. The hypothesis is justified only insofar as it presupposes things that are relatively inaccessible to us only because of their remoteness in space and time. Metaphysical hypotheses are a non-starter. What matters is not that the consequences of a hypothesis are confirmed, but that the content of a hypothesis can be proven as a fact if the empirical possibility were present. Extension of this principle to inorganic and organic natural sciences. Haeckel's monism is therefore correct in principle. If we understand ourselves correctly, the world does not lead us out of itself. It must be explainable from within itself. There is only one world of experience, but it contains all the elements for its explanation and comprehensibility. There is nothing inexplicable in nature. The things that are supposed to be inexplicable to us must first be invented. Nothing truly real is incomprehensible; only the fantastic entities that humanity has created as reality and beyond that, are incomprehensible. We always remain only before the self-created barriers of knowledge.